Eugie

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Eugie is the nickname of a character born in late 1996 in Moscow. They are a young artist and aspiring author with years of experience as a battle mage. Eugie has a tendency to get into various important situations, which makes them in many ways a central figure in many occurrences happening in Universe ς.

The main source of Eugie’s power is the Black Octahedron, a crystallized soul that grants the ability to transmute matter — in Eugie’s case by transforming it into modeling clay. Since early childhood Eugie has been involved into the unending battle between good and evil taking on many faces and forms. They present themselves as an agent of good and try to always take the right side, but that in itself is a major flaw of their personality that sometimes makes them act cruel and unfeeling.

History

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Xaltis

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Around elementary school age Eugie, exhibiting unusual talent for dimension hopping, has established contact with another world. That world was the benevolent empire of Xaltis, spanning an entire solar system of nine planets orbiting a star of pure burning magic. Exploring this strange world, Eugie was noticed by one of the arch-mages of the empire, who took them in as a protégé and enrolled them into the Imperial Academy. It was then that Eugie first discovered a talent for earth-bending and matter manipulation, and it was there that they took a vow to fight for the sake of good and protect the vulnerable.

Sadly, their education was tragically cut short. A rival empire to Xaltis had been plotting a strike against them for years — and their assault on the metropolis star system only took mere minutes. Eugie was on Xaltis when it all began and saw the enemy fleet’s avant-garde charging right into the Sun of Xaltis. A destructive charge was planted into the star, a sort of magical computer virus. Eugie’s mentor thought it would transform the star into a black hole, but the program was more sinister. |25| The Sun of Xaltis collapsed, but then rapidly expanded again, sending a magical shockwave through the star system. It froze the entire system in time right as everything and everyone was burning violently. Eugie was among the seven last known people to escape the Xaltis metropolis, all of them young academy students, exiting through a portal mere seconds before everything would be forever encased in timeless suffering. As the shockwave approached the outer edge of the star system, it crystallized into an impenetrable barrier, making Xaltis a living monument to its own destruction. The rival empire would go unpunished for this heinous crime, and still in that universe the warped light of the Sun of Xaltis illuminates the sky since every dusk.

Eugie did not escape Xaltis without a parting gift from their mentor. Hoping to save at least something, he gave them a set of fifteen crystals that together had immense creative magical ability. The portal got damaged as Eugie and their friends were escaping, sending them all roughly back to their home worlds but wildly off the mark within them, and some of them were even being tracked. Escaping the imperial army, Eugie used the crystals in the sky over the North polar circle to create a barrier |26| similar to the one that had already covered Xaltis forever. Time inside this barrier did not stop, though, and after Eugie successfully escaped back home, their gift that they left there for safety would go on to exercise its creative power in unexpected ways. One by one the crystals even escaped, but that is an entirely different story.

Eugie’s gift — or, maybe, their burden, — was called Elements: it was fifteen crystal shards with incredible potential to affect reality, each in its own way. Once it became clear that the Elements were dangerous when left unchecked and different kinds of actors began to pop up wanting to use their power for themselves, Eugie took on the responsibility they inherited from a dead empire and set out to collect the Elements for safekeeping. On that quest they were aided by their younger sister, then barely an elementary school kid, but already possessing sheer willpower of a seasoned barbarian warrior, not to mention incredible destructive powers, both physical and magical. Among the Elements Eugie came across a different kind of crystal, one that would become integral to their powers and existence: the Black Octahedron, a small gem that gave them strong geokinesis powers. Together Eugie and their sister have successfully collected the 15 Elements and returned them for safekeeping back beyond the barrier they once created. With the power of the Black Octahedron Eugie was able to reforge a ring out of meralite, a magical pliable metal that under magical fields could have a consistency similar to clay. The ring can be transformed into a long scepter ещ гешдшяу еру зщцук ща еру Удуьутеыб црукумук ерун фку: the Meralia Scepter, previously presumably destroyed for a long time.

Yellowgreen Magic School

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Recognizing their sister’s magical talent, Eugie applied her and themselves to Yellowgreen Magic School in the Anlistern world. It was there where they met six other children and formed an alliance they would call the «World Savers» [sic]. This alliance was formed in response to the threat of Master Raven, an ancient mage’s ghost with the goal of conquering Anlistern to reclaim the throne his clan once lost and exacting revenge on those who had wronged him. |27| As Master Raven crossed Eugie’s sister, she formed the World Savers with her sibling and the friends they had met at Yellowgreen. Together they have defeated Master Raven and his cohort of followers and saved Anlistern from an immense threat.

A couple years after they were done with Yellowgreen, Eugie once took their sister to meet some old and wise sensei in the mountains. In that sensei’s hut they found an entire school for elite warriors, the Samurai Academy. Eugie’s sister immediately decided to enroll there, taking on a boy’s persona under a false assumption that the academy was male-only. Eugie stuck around as a researcher, aiding their sister in her escapades at climbing to the top of the academy’s hierarchy and helping her collect the Elements that had escaped once again, save the nearby Wuhu Island from a heinous witch and defend the academy’s honor against the nearby Ninja College. Even though Eugie’s sister never finished her education, becoming more interested in the grounded matters of their home world, it was an important step in both of their stories.

External World

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Returning to live in Universe ς, Eugie quickly got noticed for their exceptional abilities (actually experience) and was recruited into the Center for preserving normalcy, a recently emerged shadowy organization intent on keeping the world safe from supernatural threats. It was using children as their main agents, since childhood and teenage years is when one’s perception of magical and otherwise strange things is the most acute. Eugie was happy to serve a good cause, and perhaps even more happy that they weren’t completely isolated from their peers thanks to the Center: a few of their recruits even went to the same school as Eugie, giving the otherwise weird and socially awkward child someone to talk to.

It wasn’t long at all before Eugie’s presence in the Center paid off for them big time: they were one of the first to discover an entirely new level of reality, permeating every point of Universe ς’s space yet interacting extremely weakly with everything except minds attuned a certain way. Seeing the vastness of this new plane of reality, it only was appropriate to name it the External World, as the reality is encased seemed so tiny by comparison. It was not entirely a material reality, but a field of mind: the External World contained the worst of the subconscious impulses sentient creatures could possibly have, a realm of violence and depravity, assaulting any onlooker’s eyes with its acidic colours even before they got a grasp of the horrifying deeds unfolding before their eyes. The Center immediately set out exploring the External World to assess its threat level and see if it had anything useful in it. Even being there proved dangerous, as exposure to the very space of that world would affect the mind, slowly transforming the entity into one of those that roamed the endless garden of vice. |28| Eugie aided in exploring the External World as hard as they could, believing it to be a dangerous entity preying on vulnerable minds (and feeling its influence on their own). A complicating matter was the appearance of students trying to obstruct the Center’s efforts, some of them in Eugie’s school. With everything like this going on around them, it was easy to slack off on preparing for final exams, as school would soon be over for Eugie.

An unspecified major sports event happened at the beginning of the year Eugie would graduate from school, and their father played a major role in televising it to the world. This event would be accompanied by a major manifestation of the Failure Demon, a pitiful frog entity hellbent on plunging the world into the despair it felt itself, only feeling joy when it saw others suffer. Going undercover, Eugie joined a group of children who would eventually (though it necessitated going back in time after a catastrophic failure) defeat the demon, who would be killed by one of its first victims.

It was on the day of their graduation that the Center unveiled scary news: the External World would soon expand into the material plane, taking over everybody’s minds into its endless mindless dance. There was no time to prepare and even less time to think, and thus Eugie set off following a set of conflicting orders, trying to stop their own classmates from destroying peace and order. During this time, their friend Alla, who they have met back in Xaltis, was put in a plane with an order to drop a powerful Reality Bomb over a set location in the External World, where she was told the command center of the attackers was. It just so happened that Eugie was fighting with their classmate, having abandoned the graduation dance, right over this place. Despite Alla’s reservations and protests, she did follow orders — which made the bomb kill Eugie, who was too slow to escape despite having their sister’s time machine.

Eugie was fine despite dying, they just so happened to have an extra life at the moment. The bomb, however, sent a terrible ripple throughout the entire External World, wiping it all from existence in an instant. Horrified, Alla, Eugie and many other children turned to the Center’s commanders, the ??? — only to find they had escaped somewhere right at the climax. What was worse, the other faction of schoolchildren turned out to also have been working for the Center, just under a slightly different name — but the leaders were exactly the same. In the coming years it would become clear that the ??? are a faction of sentient entities from multiple worlds whose goal is eradicating magic for the sake of making the multiverse more predictable and more easily controllable. |29| They disappeared after achieving that goal of theirs, but they would resurface later many times across Universe ς and other worlds.

Terczia

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After graduating high school Eugie was enticed by their friend Alla to apply to the University of magical art and design in the Terczia star system, a world where advanced computational technology has long become the guiding force in society. By some freak accident, but actually due to half a year of careful convincing by Alla, it turned out that two of their other friends who were also once members of the World Savers, by the names Olga and Valery, have also decided to apply to this university. Even though it was weird and they all have been on their different ways for quite some time, the prospect of such a long reunion was pleasant, and so the four of them successfully applied to join the university at different faculties.

Terczia prepared another surprise for them: a familiar face that each of the four of them knew in a different light, having met under different circumstances — a girl named Ethel, a charming young lady with a mysterious past, missing an eye and always covering up most of her body, with an immense magical talent and fairly unstable emotions. Eugie knew perhaps more about Ethel’s past than either of their friends: they met once during Eugie’s journeys across dimensions to retrieve an Element. Ethel was a victim of the imperial regime of a faraway world, a noble child captured and tortured for the crimes of her parents, and now she was rebelling against the very gods of her world that turned a blind eye to such injustice. Eugie helped her a bit in her righteous quest, only stopping once things got to slaying gods. They thought they’d known Ethel rather well, but the girl that appeared in front of them in Terczia was completely different. It only took a comparison of notes between the four friends to find out that something was wrong, and the Ethel each of them knew only bore a superficial resemblance to the Ethel they were seeing now. Ethel, however, got herself comfortable with the ex-World Savers and, despite the obvious disparities in their stories, everyone saw the pleasant and steadfast girl they had all known in her.

Little did they know about an artifact that had come into Ethel’s possession during her years of wandering across worlds. Every day in her backback she was carrying a cursed manuscript, the Black Book full of deranged ramblings of a long forgotten madman, and within it was imprisoned a condemned empress of the very empire that had destroyed Xaltis. Her name was Pfefferia, and her goal was to escape the book, reclaim the throne usurped by her son and continue her way of conquest across the universe. Pfefferia enticed Ethel by promising to heal her body and give her the power to slay any god. To unlock the book and let the empress out, Ethel needed to find nothing less than the Black Octahedron.

At first Ethel kept up the façade of aiding her old friends in their investigation of the strange things happening around the Terczia University, but soon the Black Book was identified as the source of those, and then Ethel got busted as its keeper. After an emotional fallout, she has established herself as her former friends’ antagonist and began playing on their psychological weaknesses to stop them from obstructing her plans. She eventually succeeded in ripping the Black Octahedron out of Eugie, but in the end she could not bring herself to kill her friend. Pfefferia, enraged, pulled Ethel with herself into the Black Book, wanting to torment her forever there — and it took Eugie themselves descending into the deranged depths to rescue Ethel and give her a chance of redemption. In the end Ethel decided to part ways with her almost friends, even if temporarily. The Black Book was sealed further and is now kept within the University library’s enfer.

Earth university and Pandemonium Generals

|30| To appease their parents, who did not believe magic was real, Eugie was receiving a double education on two different worlds. In their home world they also uncovered a sinister plot in their university: the dean of their faculty invited a shady group of demons, calling themselves the Pandemonium Generals, to disrupt education and fail students, slowly whitting away at their motivation to study and live. Eugie’s discovery made them a target of the Generals, and while they managed to neutralize two demons, the strongest of them knocked them out on the day of the final exam, making Eugie fail it, which expelled them from the university, and destroying the main conduit of their magical powers, leaving them with not even half their usual strength.

Defeated, but still seeing no way forward but to progress in their education, Eugie began rebuilding their strength and will to live piece by piece, aided by seven guardian spirits who had taken on the shape of plush toys when Eugie was a baby. As they applied again to the same university that expelled them, one dark February night they were approached by a young demon hunter named Carina Denikina. She said she’d heard of their fall from grace and offered to recruit them into her team of hunters. Eugie hesitantly half-agreed, spending the spring with her and her team. The experience they gained and the newfound knowledge of people gave them the strength to defeat the rest of the Pandemonium Generals, seemingly cleansing their faculty of evil, at least for now.

|12-1| Frost

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A new threat was discovered in the summer of 2016 in Universe ς, though. Several independent young researchers with the right arcanometeorological equipment detected traces of dangerous microparticles in the air over Moscow. This matter in high enough density was highly corrosive to everything magical, eating through it like rust and leaving nothing behind, even capable of destroying the magic contained in living souls. Later dubbed Frost, it greatly upset Carina, who would take it upon herself to discover the origin of these particles. It turned out to be a secret factory right by Eugie’s house, and Carina even found out that it was most likely being operated by the ???.

|2| After a long and tedious independent analysis Carina and her friends came to the conclusion that they simply had no resources to sabotage Frost production. They did discover ???’s plans: disperse this matter over Moscow on December 25th, 2016, cleansing the city of everything supernatural, and then move on to the rest of the world. As December was approaching, they were all the better understanding their helplessness against an interdimensional organization entrenched into their country’s government, but still they had no chance but to put up a fight. When the day arrived, Frost descended upon the city in the form of gargantuan semi-organic machines spreading their antimagical matter through the air. No matter how far Carina tried to spread her warning, most did not want to believe that such a ridiculous thing could possibly occur, and those who heeded it were still widely unprepared for a threat of this scale. So any anti-Frost initiative that did form, fell pretty quickly. Thanks to some divine miracle, Carina was able to organize a covert operation under the very noses of the ???, with Eugie along. All this time Eugie has been holding onto a magical item of immense power: a Volga Stone, having the potential to reverse any catastrophe, provided it has enough power. Ordinarily the Frost onslaught would have been rather trivial, but Eugie’s hesitance to use it led to there being not nearly enough magic in the entire city to power up stone. Desperate, Eugie offered a sacrifice to the stone: erase their own existence. It would have worked, but Carina intervened in their self-defeatism, ordering the Stone to change certain specific events in the past instead. As those two sacrifices were incompatible and both of them were willing to make them, it resulted in undefined behaviour from the Volga Stone. Suddenly it amplified Carina’s elemental power, Heat, by several orders of magnitude, allowing her to destroy every single Frost contraption in one single blow. Using their Meralia Scepter in conjunction with the Volga Stone, Eugie was able to bring back more or less everything destroyed in the attack. Some things, though, like Alla’s kidnapping by the ???, took up to half a year to resolve.

|3| The Owl

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This section is not yet written because the events that it would describe are still unclear.
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Cloud Order and the Haze

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Recovering from the events described in detail in the previous section, Eugie had to take an academic leave and went to the psychiatric ward. Thanks to the miraculous occurences of divine mercy that saved them in the first place, though, their condition has been steadily improving. At the end of March their friend got attacked by a demon hunter from the future, which prompted Eugie’s nonfunctional Lock Notepad to change its owner to protect them. Eugie, however, picked up a second notepad from the version of themselves that attempted to stop the attacker and failed, dying at their hands, and thus gained access to most of their magical abilities again.

At the end of June the main consequence of Eugie using the Volga Stone to cure the world of the Frost presented itself in the form of Sculptor, a version of Eugie from an alternate reality created by the Stone where the Frost’s arrival was not stopped right away, but delayed, and thus it had manifested in a very different way and actually ended up successfully disintegrating all the magic in that pocket world, which collapsed it, leaving only Sculptor, who managed to escape. They did not appear intent on communicating with anybody about what they had seen; worse yet, they brought a strain of Frost within themselves into the main reality. Their body was at constant threat of collapse. That version of Eugie had much longer, flowing hair that reached almost to their ankles, and always covered their eyes with mirror-like round sunglasses. Upon materializing, Sculptor immediately went for the Elements, which prompted their guardian at the time, Eugie’s sister’s toy, to scatter them around the world, sending Eugie and their friends around the world to find collect them again, this time in a race against Sculptor. Even though they were bitten by the Frost, their power seemed greater than Eugie’s own at the time, which made them a formidable opponent and the threat of what they would do if they got the creative power of all 15 Elements all the more grave.

Á suivre...